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Adebola Journal 7
Duante made the tiny crab scuttle across the rickety table, grab a length of wire in its claws and scurry back to him. He accepted it, not needing to even watch the casual interaction between his cyber fingers and the microdrone. Adebola, sitting across from him, applauded. He stifled a grin and said, “Now your turn. I’m releasing the crab so you can subscribe to it.” Adebola frowned in concentration. Her hair had not yet grown back over her new control rig implant; she looked like a half-plucked chicken. Duante remembered how itchy it had been when he got his so many years ago, but the technology had changed since then, and the surgery was minimal. The specialist had shaved her head more, as she’d admitted, to control Adebola’s infestation of lice than because the installation required it. The crab snapped one claw hesitantly, stumbled over its own legs and clattered from the table. Adebola jumped from her stool to snatch it from the floor. The crab’s claws nipped her fingers and she jerked back with a squeak of alarm. “Ah, you’ve activated its self-defense autosoft. Try to turn it off before you pick it up again.” Adebola’s face went blank. Eventually she’d be able to issue commands to her drones without anyone noticing, but every new rigger went through this same challenge, learning to interact with and control a body that wasn’t connected to your own wetware. The metahuman brain was a marvelously flexible organ, but still could not adjust to these challenges immediately; Duante remembered his own struggles and eventual delight when he first jumped into a drone not much different from the crab. It was an eerie sensation, literally as if your spirit had fled its body for someplace else although he reminded himself that it was simply the control rig circumventing his body’s signals to his brain and back again, and replacing them with comparable information from the drone. On the floor, the crab went into a snapping fury, scuttling so wildly that it actually snagged one of its legs in its claws and danced in a circle, struggling with it, like a cat who had caught its own tail and wasn’t bright enough to realize it. He watched Adebola frantically trying to stop it, and suddenly press her hands against her face with a muffled sob. Duante snarled, “You idiot, what do you think you’re doing?” without thinking and plucked the drone from the floor, disentangling it and shutting it down with a thought. By the time he looked up again, the little ork was gone. That night, trying to sleep, he kept telling himself that the stupid little ork would have to toughen up if she wanted to continue as his student, that she had no right to expect patience from a crusty old ex-rigger, that she was an idiot and clumsy too. But her scared and panicked face floated before him in the darkness. Shit, he’d have to try to find her. Tomorrow, he promised himself and tried to settle himself for sleep. By 3:00 AM, he had searched the places he’d most expected to find her. He’d bribed a few Area Boys, and gotten nowhere. One said he thought he’d seen her headed towards Ikeja but he couldn’t imagine why – it was well outside of her normal scavenging ground. She usually wandered through dumpsters and garbage dumps in Festac town for the mechanical doodads that they both enjoyed so much. But he’d tried those places already. He found himself grumbling to himself, “stupid little ork, don’t you have the survival instincts of a devil rat? How’ve you lived on the streets so long, if you go stumbling into places that won’t give you anything useful, and are dangerous besides?” Of course, he knew the entirety of Lagos was dangerous for one like her, that if she vanished, nobody would notice her body among the garbage lining the streets or dumped into the delta. Stupid, stupid, stupid. By the time he reached Ikeja, he couldn’t have sworn if he was naming her or himself. The image that kept summoning itself before his eyes was of her broken body, rotting in a pile of garbage, her new control rig stolen by some enterprising Area Boy. Anya, his old team-mate, had warned him about becoming too attached to the little “tusker drek” as she’d called Adie, but even then, it had been too late. He kept telling himself that he’d look one more block and then head home to sleep, but he kept going. His little flying drones made faster progress than his legs, reporting back lots of activity but not spotting her. When he found her, he was hardly surprised his drones hadn’t found her. She had crawled into a space under a broken set of steps leading into an abandoned factory, and dragged a plastic tarp over herself. She was shuddering, eyes squeezed closed, teeth rattling in her head, her breath shallow gasps that made his own chest hurt. She didn’t look hurt otherwise, but her body was trembling so much, she had to be seriously sick. He tried to remember the symptoms of VITAS, but his own terror made it impossible for him to do more than mutter “stupid little tusker drek, what were you thinking?” over and over, like a chant. He gathered her up in the plastic, setting his drones to ward off anyone who came too close and staggered his slow way to a clinic. Which one though? He didn’t know the local ones, and it was some ungodly hour (5 AM, one of his drones helpfully provided) and nobody would be around anyhow. He sent his drones ranging to find an open clinic or street doc. Adebola’s shuddering had stopped but he didn’t know if that was a bad sign or a good one. His most decrepit little flying drone, a broken down old first generation Bumblebee, which had lagged behind the rest and gotten lost, reported that the clinic in Apapa was still lit and active, so he bribed a gang of Area Boys to provide an okada, the motorcycles which served as fast transportation in Lagos. He’d overpaid too, but he needed one with a side car if he wanted to get Adie the help she needed. Her normally dark skin had a green tinge that he didn’t like at all and he could barely hear her breathe. The Apapa clinic was bustling; some gang fight had gotten out of hand somewhere nearby, and he resorted to a combination of bribery and threats to get someone to look Adie over. The doctor, a thin, black elf, at first disdainfully insisted that it was a drug overdose, that he didn’t have time to deal with her. Duante wanted to shake him until his pointy ears fell off, but steeled himself to patience, insisting over and over again that Adie wasn’t an addict, that she was too serious about her survival to do anything that stupid. The doctor shrugged and aimed some device at her that Duante had no idea about, and then said in heavily accented English “She just have surgery?” Duante nodded frantically. “Did it go wrong?” The elf didn’t answer, frowning over a syringe that he was filling from a clear vial. When he injected her, the change was shockingly fast; her face flushed and she started breathing almost normally again. He swallowed hard and started babbling. “Oh god, I thought she was going to die. What did you do? Is she better now? Was it the surgery?” The elf watched Adie for a few minutes, replying absent-mindedly. “She’s allergic to penicillin-like drugs. Has she had it before?” “I don’t know,” replied Duante. “She might have. When would she have gotten penicillin?” “Routine during that type of surgery, just to prevent infection. I’m not sure what form they gave her but she must have been exposed sometime in the past; you don’t usually react that badly for the first dose.” Duante slumped on the wobbly stool beside Adie's cot, swearing to himself he'd be a better teacher, a better friend to the little ork, no matter what idiocy she commited. For a moment, Anya's frowning face swam before his eyes, but he shrugged it away. Anya was dead. There was no way in hell he'd let Adie follow her.